Crossroads (1986) on Netflix
A Juilliard student named Eugene Martone hunts a lost Robert Johnson blues tune. He finds Willie Brown, an elderly musician who claims to know it, and breaks him out of custody.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Seventeen-year-old Eugene Martone studies classical guitar at Juilliard, but the blues are what he cares about, along with the legend of Robert Johnson, who was said to have sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads. Eugene hunts for a Johnson song the world believes lost. He traces Willie Brown, an elderly harmonica player who knew Johnson and admits knowing the tune, though he will not give it up unless Eugene breaks him out of the hospital where he is held and takes him to Mississippi to settle unfinished business. With little money, the two travel south, and Willie runs small scams while teaching Eugene how the blues should be played. On the road they meet Frances, a runaway heading for Los Angeles.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Crossroads (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The script was an original by John Fusco, a blues singer and musician who had been warned by a doctor to rest his voice. In 1981 his girlfriend, working at a rest home, told him an old man with a harmonica had been admitted, and on the way to visit him Fusco imagined the player as a legendary bluesman.
- Fusco wrote the script as his Master's Thesis at New York University, and it was only his second screenplay. Producer Mark Carliner acted as his independent adviser and later helped get it made. Fusco was paid $250,000.
- The student screenplay won first place in the national FOCUS Awards for films of college and university students, and was sold to Columbia Pictures while Fusco was still a student.
SPOILER
The original script ended with Joe Seneca's character dying on a Greyhound bus. Director Walter Hill's father had died shortly before production began and he found the scene difficult to film, so he also shot a happier ending; both were tested with audiences and the happy one was chosen.- Director Walter Hill wanted a harder boxing-match style battle and considered Keith Richards, Frank Zappa and Stevie Ray Vaughan for the part of Butler, settling on Alcatrazz player Steve Vai in the hope that fashionable shred guitar would widen the film's appeal.
- The guitar Butler drops heavily to the floor in the duel was Vai's own custom Charvel with DiMarzio pickups and a Floyd Rose tremolo, so the crew hastily built mock-up instruments for the shot. The original, signed by Vai, is now in the Hard Rock Cafe collection.
SPOILER
Eugene wins the duel by playing a neoclassical metal composition called Eugene's Trick Bag, which quotes heavily from violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini's Caprice No. 5.- Crossroads was Robert Judd's final film role. He died of stomach cancer in January 1986, two months before the film's theatrical release.
